Ask the Expert – Is there a way of storing sheet music on my ipad to use whilst leading?

“Just been to one of your Musicademy Live Training Day at Tonbridge today and had a great day, with lots of very practical advice and ideas on how to develop our worship ministries in our church. Thank you very much, would definitely recommend that other musicians and worship leaders attend these training days.

I have a question about worship software and using new technologies in worship have wasn’t part of todays agenda, but would value any knowledge that the Musicademy might have on the subject.

I have an iPad and have been trying to look a a way that I could store all my sheet music on it and use it as a digital song sheet when leading. I have just this week discovered CCLI Songselect which sounds great, but I’m still looking at a way to use it effectively. A friend recently mentioned seeing some worship leading using iPads, so I want to see if this is something you guys have any know of or advise on or if it could be an article you guys could do about using modern media tools in the worship context and maybe publish an article on this subject.”

We are delighted to give Neil a reply along with a detailed description of the Power Music product range which we’ve had first hand experience of and really rate.

Power Music from Cambron Software is great software for managing sheet music and chord sheets for digital display. You can store, manage and display all your music along with performance notes, annotations, and playlists using Power Music. Power Music is available for all Windows based PCs laptops and tablets and for all types of Apple iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.

Power Music 4 is the full featured version, but there is a free Windows version – Power Music Lite and a free Apple iOS app. All versions of Power Music have the ability to add audio for backing tracks, display instantly, transpose chord sheets, and set up playlists. You can search for your music by title, author and category. The PC version has extra searches – first line, lyrics, melody and Bible reference.

No internet connection is required to run the software when performing. A USB foot pedal is available for hands-free page turning.

You can enter your own music to Power Music 4 which has a chord sheet editor, PDF importer for chord sheets and sheet music and scanner software for sheet music. Depending on the size of screen you can display several pages side by side, using a pedal for page turning. Once entered into Power Music 4 all music can be transferred to the account holder’s PCs and Apple iOS devices using Power Music Box – Cambron’s unique cloud-based music storage and sharing system .

A new, unique type of music store – www.powermusicstore.com , launches today which provides Virtual Songbooks in complete Power Music format. Music purchased in the Power Music Store can immediately be downloaded to an iOS or Windows device using the built in Power Music Box facility. Cambron expect to expand the available content over time.

The free Power Music Box account gives users unlimited storage space for purchased songs and a limited amount of storage for the user’s own songs. At any time, users can upgrade their Power Music Box account to obtain more storage space for their own songs.

Cambron also have a great Christmas offer. Click through for more details. Other links are below:

Hi – I use an iPad to store all of my music in PDF format in an App called ‘Deep Dish Gig Book’. May be worth looking at. It does the job very well and you can do the usuall things like sorting etc, but most importantly make set lists for each service.

We’ve been using PlanningCenterOnline (PCO) to help organise and index all our song repertoire, as well as deal with our services’ and musicians’ rotas. There’s an add-on to PCO available, called Music Stand, which lets you display the PDFs / chords&lyrics on your iPad (or laptop, or a separate computer display), and we’ve trialled it for a couple of months and found it really useful.

PCO allows you to store multiple arrangements / PDFs for each song, and the chords&lyrics can be quickly transposed into any key (great for capo players!) – you can also annotate and highlight PDFs for your service when you’re rehearsing (e.g. marking up the structure and dynamics and any other cues you might want for that particular time).
When we’ve finally got PDFs/chords&lyrics set up for all our repertoire in PCO (made easier with CCLI’s SongSelect service), we’re definitely going to make wider use of Music Stand. It’s very flexible, in that each member of the band can choose what they want to see for each song – whether a full score, lead sheet, chords – and the markup at rehearsal time is very handy.
For sheet music users, an old 15″ LCD (4:3) screen hooked up to a laptop works really well, as it’s about the size of an A3 sheet – usually enough for a song, though you can add a USB page-turning footswitch if you want. £15 for a mint used screen was more cost-effective for me than buying an iPad :-) and I found I could easily mount it on a sturdy music stand.
Happy to share more details of experience with PCO and Music Stand if you want: [email protected]
Daren

Brenda Cameron

The advantage of using Power Music is that you can create all your own versions of songs on your PC before transferring to the iPad. You can even import chord sheets from PDF files which can then be transposed! It is a complete management and editing system.

No matter what score app you choose, most of them allow you create set lists. The better ones let you change the set order on the fly during worship, which is a real life-saver for a keyboard player using full scores. You never know when things are going to change!

Steve

Don’t forget OnSong and Ireland Book…

DanKnight

Three words: NOT Good yet!

I’ve tried it out, along with OnSong. comparing these two products is like comparing a fighter jet with a cessna: both will get you in the air, both will move you faster than walking, but the thrill of the jet and manuverability, the power….no comparison.

Transposition is a key deficiency: OnSong’s transposer is highly functional and intuitive; PM’s almost non-existent, you get to bounce up and down keys, but not also apply capo positions, or even add chord charts to the screen.

The ONLY plus is the price: Free vs $8, but we’re talking the price of two Starbucks coffees, And if you’ve already dropped the coins for the iPad, then 8 dollars is money well spent to get an app that does all and more than the inferior PM.

However, apps evolve as their developers expand their functionality: The third word is the hopeful one; IF the PM dev team works on what is lacking from their app, there’s great potential for it to be a player.

Gabriel Hauber

I am one of the developers of a recently released app that also attempts to provide a solution to this issue. It is called SongSheet and has just been released on the App store in the last week.

Currently it does not have all the features of either Power Music or OnSong, but it does have a couple of tricks up its sleeve that the other apps do not have: WYSIWYG editing of chord sheets, easier set-list management, programmable verse changes and auto-follow so that if you use backing tracks you can program it all once, turn on AirPlay mirroring or use a VGA/HDMI cable, and have the verses automatically appear on the external display.

The other developer of SongSheet uses it every week in a worship leading context in his church, and it has been working there very well.

philipjohnt

I use SongBook by Linkesoft. Again all usual stuff like set lists, categories, transposition, auto scroll and has OSX and windows versions